Focus Africa
Coronavirus: What Beijing Isn't Saying
Almost three thousand cases in 16 countries and over 80 deaths. (1) 16 cities under quarantine, for a total of approximately 56 million people cordoned off (slightly less than the total of the Italian population, to get an idea). In Wuhan there are complaints of empty supermarkets (2) retail prices that have tripled, face masks and disinfectants now impossible to find, overflowing hospitals (3), and insufficient beds and medical personnel. And while state TV celebrates the figure of Liang Wudong, the retired doctor called back to face the emergency, who was infected and died "on the field," social ...
Coronavirus: What Beijing Isn't Saying
Almost three thousand cases in 16 countries and over 80 deaths. (1) 16 cities under quarantine, for a total of approximately 56 million people cordoned off (slightly less than the total of the Italian population, to get an idea). In Wuhan there are complaints of empty supermarkets (2) retail prices that have tripled, face masks and disinfectants now impossible to find, overflowing hospitals (3), and insufficient beds and medical personnel. And while state TV celebrates the figure of Liang Wudong, the retired doctor called back to face the emergency, who was infected and died "on the field," social ...
Capitalism and entrepreneurship
The Focus of this issue of E&M collects a series of speeches started from the article of Prof. Franco Amatori, Full Professor of Economic History at Bocconi University, on the birth and characteristics of European capitalism. Discussing this issue are important names in Italian economics such as Prof. Francesco Giavazzi (Full Professor of Political Economics at Bocconi University), Luca Paolazzi (Partner at REF Ricerche) and Edoardo Reviglio (Chief Economist and Head of Economic and Statistical Research at the Cassa Depositi e Prestiti-CDP). Here is a brief extract from the contribution of Prof. ...
Culture as a Business Tool
What is the relationship between businesses and cultural value? How can the latter increase the competitiveness of the former? And what tools can be used to invest in and develop the cultural sector? Economics and culture are only apparently different worlds. If on the one hand there is the business sector, with the aim of achieving financial results, on the other there is culture, with its multiple declinations in terms of identity, history, artistic expression, creative atmosphere, and social sustainability, that can act as an irreplaceable factor of growth and sustainable development for businesses ...
How Business Culture Changes with Technology
We are living in times of great, rapid transformation. In every area we see that people live, work, seek entertainment and consume goods and services with methods and tools that are increasingly different from those of the past. We see the world changing at an unprecedented speed. The digitization of many sectors, the use of artificial intelligence, robotization, and the frequent birth of startups are phenomena that have now become normal, and naturally lead to accelerations and changes in all fields, even in the most consolidated and traditional sectors. This is a process that we cannot stop ...
Brexit 2.0: The Chickens Come Home to Roost
Has something really changed for Brexit after Boris Johnson’s triumph in the recent British parliamentary elections? It certainly seems that way, but not for the reasons many people believe, that is, that clarity has finally been reached on the will of the people, who’s in charge in a democracy, and what type of Brexit we can expect. Boris Johnson’s Conservatives won the elections, with an 80-seat majority (their largest majority since 1987) thanks to 43.6 percent of the vote (the highest percentage of any party since 1979). With that majority Johnson will no longer have to duel with a largely ...
Digital Surveillance
The market for surveillance technologies will have a value of 62 billion dollars by 2023 (1), and it seems that in this field as well, China will be dominant. Eight of the ten most surveilled cities in the world are in the People's Republic (2) where facial recognition is already used in many rail stations, banks, airports, in some school buildings, many hotels, and in subway systems. And that is not all: starting this month, whoever wants to a SIM card will be required to submit to a facial scan (3). This is the result of an ambitious government program launched in 2017 (4) that foresees covering ...
Creating value for business clients
The recent debate on the evolution of business marketing shows a "disconnect" between the trends that have emerged in the past decade - in the institutional macro-environment, the competitive meso-environment and the business micro-environment - and the attention to the consequences of the changes associated with those trends in business-to-business dynamics. In light of this evolution, the book sets the ambitious goal of examining the debate and identifying the missing "pieces," so as to fill in the gap between academic debate and managerial practice. In particular, the first elements to be examined ...
The European Banking Union: a Proposal for Discussion
A few weeks ago, the German Finance Minister Olaf Scholz published an article in the Financial Times in which, starting from a non-paper prepared by his Ministry, he summarized his thinking regarding the European Banking Union (EBU). The article was, and still is, the subject of great interest. It is well-known that the EBU was decided on a number of years ago with the aim of creating a single European banking market based on three fundamental pillars: common oversight of banks; uniform regulations on the resolution of bank crises; and homogenization and integration of regulations on bank deposit ...
Lagarde, A Wise Owl Between Hawks and Doves
The handover of responsibility from Mario Draghi to the new president of the European Central Bank Christine Lagarde was marked by three aspects: two results, and one question. The two results regard the ability to implement unconventional monetary policies and the reliability of the Bank's institutional structure. The question regards the future. The first result can be appreciated by remembering that Draghi's term coincided with macroeconomic events that were extraordinary, in the literal sense of the term. The dual recession that the European Union suffered in the years between 2008 and 2013 ...